Prepared Diet Food: The Good, the Bad, and the Unhealthy

We tested five popular weight-loss delivery plans; read on for the best and the worstplus, get our picks from your grocer's aislesText by Megan O. Steintrager / Additional reporting by Heather Tyree / Photography by Steven Torres

L
osing weight is
hard enough, but then factor in counting calories, watching portions,
and making the food, and it's no wonder that more than half of us in
the U.S. are overweight. That's why millions turn to diet-delivery
services, which promise tasty, hopefully healthy food in slimming
portions, delivered right to your door. The Epicurious editorial team
evaluated five of the biggest plans to discover which is the best, both
in taste and nutrition. The winner? We pick...eDiets!

Our Research Methods

We test-drove five popular plans, all available nationwide:
ZoneChefs, eDiets, NutriSystem, PureFoods Low Carb, and Jenny Craig. We
opted for the full meal plans from each, so we got breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. The food ranged from fresh to frozen or freeze-driedplus
some pretty scary-looking shelf-stable meats. We tasted a week's worth
of meals from each plan and found vast differences in quality from
company to companyand even from dish to dish within the same meal
plan. We enjoyed plenty of items, such as a juicy almond-crusted
chicken breast, but we were sorry we even had to contemplate eating
othersskunky freeze-dried eggs spring to mind. We also noted some
shocking similarities: After getting a few identical dishes (we're
talking about you, "Very Berry Chicken") from ZoneChefs, eDiets, and
PureFoods Low Carb, we discovered that all three plans shipped from the
same plant in Iowa.

Our Scoring System

Our rankings reflect flavor, nutrition, convenience, portion size,
variety, similarity to real food (i.e.: few artificial flavors and
textures), customer service, and extras such as tools to track progress
and exercise components. The prices reflect the rates at the time we
ordered the plans, along with all sign-up and cancellation fees. Keep
in mind that some plans are cheaper if you order more than a week's
worth of food or sign up for automatic renewal, etc., and that the two
cheapest plans (Jenny Craig and NutriSystem) require you to add the
most to create a full meal. For the nutritional analysis, we turned to
Monica Reinagel, chief nutritionist for our sister site NutritionData.com and author of The Inflammation Free Diet Plan.

Note: These diet-delivery services and supermarket meals were evaluated in March 2007 and have not been retested.